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Wing stand question.

Randy Walls

Randy Walls

Active Member
I am building the wings for an RV-7 and have what is probably a dumb question. My shop has a very high ceiling and I really don't want to drill holes in the floor, (the shop will later be used as a finished room). My son suggested I anchor the wing stands in a 5 gallon bucket fastened to a piece of plywood and filled with concrete. Do you guys that have built wings think this might work? I looked through the older posts about stands and didn't find any help.
Thanks
 
Hi Randy,

My 2 c...I would not risk it, drilling or worse riveting pressure is going to move those buckets ever so slightly...

Regards
Rudi
 
Go ahead and anchor the stand to the floor. A concrete floor is very easy to patch. I did this and when I finished, I patched the holes and painted the floor. You could not see where the holes had been.
 
Randy,
You can probably buy a hammer drill (on sale) at Harbor Freight as cheap as renting one elsewhere.
Charlie Kuss
PS I paid $25 for mine.
 
Wing Stand/fixtures

I had exactly the same scenareo building my -4 super slow build wings. I used 2 ea. 2X6's siamesed together and put a 12" 2X6 bottom plate on the post, then used RTV to "glue" it to the floor, and at the top I secured them with big C-clamps to the floor joists.Worked great, never moved and when done just pulled them to the side and it broke the RTV loose..Ta da, no holes...remember they are just a fixture and dont really get a lot of stress put on them.

Bill E.
RV-4 painting/finish
 
fixnflyguy said:
I had exactly the same scenareo building my -4 super slow build wings. I used 2 ea. 2X6's siamesed together and put a 12" 2X6 bottom plate on the post, then used RTV to "glue" it to the floor, and at the top I secured them with big C-clamps to the floor joists.Worked great, never moved and when done just pulled them to the side and it broke the RTV loose..Ta da, no holes...remember they are just a fixture and dont really get a lot of stress put on them.

Bill E.
RV-4 painting/finish
Click to expand...

I'll try that. Thanks
 
I had the same situation. High ceilings and not really excited about drilling into the floor. I opted to build a stand with wheels. It makes it handy to move it out to work on, then push it off to the side to get the vehicle in. The turn-buckles make it nice to make fine adjustments to level it out. I used it on the left wing and it worked great. Just put the right wing on it last weekend.


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Doug V.
RV-7
Wings
 
Consider this...

Don't bother trying to make the perfect, square, level, jig, because you won't. Make it really rigid and you'll be more likely to force the wing, which is entirely self-jigging, to conform to an imperfect jig. (The empennage doesn't need jigging anymore, either. Same concept.) My last two pairs of wings were riveted together without even attaching the post bottoms to the floor. There were marks for indexing normal to the floor. Yeah, they moved around, and the support arms eventually drooped a bit. But the wings come out fine if you let them conform to the prepunched holes.

John Siebold
Boise, ID
 
randy, i built mine from 4 inch channel. a free standing version. i plan on using it to paint the wings. will mount some bearings on it to rotate the wings.
 
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